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Increasing coto repair will ruin player economy

Discussion in 'Release 36 Dev+ Feedback Forum' started by reuge, Nov 11, 2016.

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  1. Bowen Bloodgood

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    Here's an idea.. *I*'ll be in charge! :D
     
  2. Silis

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    I do believe the general idea is in the right direction but I think there should be a few things looked at, for one I believe there should be a hard cap to maximum repairs, maybe even scaling on the + of the item allowing high level items a bit more wiggle room. To me soft caps with maximum cost as a deterrent has too many issues. I also think there needs to be some work done to close the disparity between auto attacking and charging your attacks, a charged attack by its nature shows a harder blow delivered and greater strain on an item and as such should result in more damage than a single auto attack. It may not be a direct 1:1 relationship but it should for balance reasons have a little more parity and decay rate balanced from there.

    Overall though for the longevity of the game and the health of crafting, items need to break and be replaced. There needs to be greater risk around the reward of using extremely high end gear with low durability and a greater reason to use mid tier items allowing more crafters to get a foot in the door.
     
  3. Bow Vale

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    While i am FOR item degradation and the need to replenish equipment i am not for the use of using an out of game premium currency to help alleviate this. Possibly the devs intentions with this increasing cost for repair with coto are to drive the player market, making cost prohibitive to continue with by repairing with coto's. If so there is no need for them to even be involved in the calculations, scrap them and use an increase in repair kits or similar, for the same effect, otherwise this allows rich players to undermine the process and when they do own a +20 item or whatever they can always keep it, even if that's costing them XX amount to do it produces a p2w environment. Keep cotos's for areas outside of TYPICAL mmo type gameplay, ie: not combat/crafting or the economy.


    Sorry for the long post, and this the best place for it unless i did an op.


    I made some statements earlier in this thread or another it was combined with regards Bows and their durability, i have done some testing on QA and these are my results.

    Although my weapon preservation skill isn't the best, it is still getting a good benefit at 43.

    I started with a bow, a +3, and used one coto to repair fully. This gave a 80/80 primary/secondary durability value. This is quite high for a bow as itesm worth using will have a higher +value. I should have used one of my +8 bows but they were socketed for another school, and it passed my mind at the time. THUS these results can only get worse, as it has been said that the greater the +value , the more the degradation of the item through wear & tear occurs. Also the high initial durability would not be typical in a live/wanting to keep item scenario and for figures to estimate cost i will drop this to a more accurate but still low 50 secondary durability, NOT taking into account the increased loss of degradation due to a more valued + item.

    Initial durability's: 80/80
    Arrows: 10, 000 Enough for me to a normal 4 hours grinding at 2500 arrows an hour rounded down, usually takes a little more, 2700 or so.

    For the first 9000 arrows i just left it on auto-attack, and for the last 1000 i included active skills. I did not see any increase in secondary durability from this and I'm guessing non also from the primary.

    After 10,000 arrows my durability dropped to : 33/76

    It appears with my skills which are id imagine quite normal that it lost one secondary durability for each 10 primary. This was expected to drop to 75 secondary when the primary got to 30 from what i had seen, about another 1000 arrows, or 20 mins play etc.

    Taking into account a good bow, one you would want to keep would have a maximum of 50 durability, likely less, i will do the costs based on 50, and not including the extra degradation due to its increased +value/power.

    47 primary durability used in 4 hours = 11.75 per hour
    4.7 secondary durability used in 4 hours = 1.175 per hour

    Thus a bow with 50 secondary durability would take 42 hours to reach 0 and need a repair, actually you would need to only let this drop to whatever you would use off the primary in a night as there's is no point going out with a bow with 0-10 primary secondary durability as it would be needing a primary repair in 1 hour. Letting it drop to 10 and still using would mean i would need 4+ or so bows the same to take out with me or having one with durability of around 50 for a nights use. So it seems for anyone going out for a 2 hour hunt couldn't let there bow drop by more than 25 secondary durability else would need to take more than one bow out with them, thus increasing costs to repair, not one but 2 or more.

    Taking the 25 as a minimum useable durability on pri/sec, then it would take a typical bow, 21 hours to need a coto repair. This would be costing me a coto repair to keep every 5 days!................Lets call it a week

    By the figures, which are experimental it states but i wouldn't envisage much change....

    Week 1...$1
    Week 2....$3
    Week 3........$6
    Week 4...............$10
    Week 5..........................$18
    Week 6.......................................$30

    Thus after a 6 week period i would have paid........$68 to use my bow........Id rather throw stones at em.

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Nov 14, 2016
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  4. rild

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    On one hand I feel like the increase might be a bit excessive. On the other hand, COTO repair is not necessary every time your item breaks.

    You can use regular repair several times (more or less depending on the max durability of the item in question) before using COTO repair to bring the max back up. It's not ideal, but I'm just saying we could be talking five or ten repairs before COTO comes into it. So, sixth COTO repair might be a year down the road.

    In general I worry about unlimited diminishing returns and rising cost - these artificial limits often seem too arbitrary. If there was at least a crafting solution that offers a middle way on this, that would be helpful. Please offer a gameplay-driven solution alongside the convenience-for-pay COTO solution. It's a little strange that you can use the COTO repair method without any skill in repair.

    What about changing COTO repair to be another potion of the Obsidians, that offer more max durability for a week of gameplay, rather than real repair? Repair would be the domain of the crafters, but there would still be another option. Just a thought.

    Finally, I will say one of the best parts of SotA's repair system is that it puts a disadvantage on insanely enchanted and bonused eq. I see massive swords with 20 durability, which devalues them hugely. I think this is great and should help to balance the game - more is not always better. I hope we continue to see better and more subtle content in this area.
     
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  5. Solazur

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    COTO's for repair was a dumb idea to begin with. ONe of the coolest things (to me at least) in old UO was popping into town and there'd be all these smiths doing repairs..many ... lesser skilled... would offer to repair free (with the disclaimer) in order to get their skills up. COTO's remove all that... oh as an aside.. NPC and PRT towns should be Multiplayer only.. For gosh sakes.. let's see interaction.
    Repairs should be based on repair skill... period. Another thing, there is a difference in how something will age (speaking in real world terms here) depending on how well it was maintained, the same should hold here. The person that maintains their gear regularly should not have max dura decay at the same rate as the person who bashes things till the warning icon appears. IMind.. there is a lot about crafting that is... "off". I'd say broken but tbh.. the more we move along.. the more I think sometimes @Chris and @DarkStarr are making it up as they go along. What makes this particularly troublesome is due to the coto's they have ppl with serious amounts of RL$ invested so no wonder folks are annoyed. I really fail to see the current idea as more than another gold sink. Now if we are to really help crafters... maybe items should be tiered, at present... if I roll a new char.. there are no limitations as to what they can use. There are a lot of ways to do that..weapons/armor could have minimum stats.. be it adv lvl (come on face it.. while hidden if is NOT a non-factor) or Str/dex... something. Then.. if that blessed day ever comes and we start to see new players those who craft will find it's worthwhile. ON that note.. as @Rosemourne mentioned.. there are vendors all fully stocked with high end stuff that does nothing but sit...the reason there.. in my humble opinion is we have a negative population "growth" issue to deal with. Perhaps we'll see a release where no new stuff is implemented (and let the artists work on something like un-cloning towns instead of more pixel crack in the addon store) but rather they fix issues, such as the piss poor performance... and make this something we can tell our friends about and not feel like the local Multi Level Marketing .. person...

    </rant>
     
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  6. Bow Vale

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    Myself if losing 40+ primary durability in a night of a starting with 50 primary/secondary bow, it would need a repair with a repair kit the next time i used. However after the first repair with a repair kit its max durability would be around 45 then....so next night i went out it would drop by again 40 on primary, and secondary would drop to 40...repaired again, so the third night i went out by time i got back, the primary durability would be 0 and the secondary 35 now....Thus on the 4th night i went out, i would need to repair in the field and my secondary would drop to 30....5th night, it would drop to 25.....at this point i would need 2 bows for a night out and thus double repair costs, so lets stay with one bow.
    If i then continued using that bow after the 5th night i would need 2 repairs in the field and secondary durability would drop to 20....the 7th night i would need 2 repairs in the field and secondary durability would drop to 15....next night 3 repairs in the field and second durability would drop to 10.....

    SO a workable position would really be at 25 but u can keep going down to 0, using more and more repair kits to get back to the always lowering max durability.

    You mention a year of using the 6th coto repair, in my situation the 6th would be really at about 1 month of playing minimum to a max of 2 months....And at that point its not just costing me $30, its cost me on each of those coto repairs.
     
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  7. Bow Vale

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    I agree and i think many would like that as well, skill matters, a choice of your trade matters, good players are in demand. I think the better repairers should be able to maybe add a durability buff of a degradation debuff to. All these car dealers who you get your car serviced with instead of the back street garage, its meant to add to your value of the car as you always got done at a registered dealer etc. Be good if you constantly got repairs done with maybe one crafter who knows your weapon, might be even best if it was the maker, a bonus to the repair could be achieved.

    Good crafters to encourage sales might offer free or less costly repairs to people that buy their weapons, adds to the world and a true player economy.
     
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  8. 2112Starman

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    All of this convo is completely mute without one driving principle that continues to hold back crafting or anything else in this game (PvP) as a whole. POPULATION and the complete lack of it lately even in persistence. I saw the numbers of people logged into my old guild go from 150 on at one time after persistence to 20 if we were luck with 250 people showing off line.

    Saying that, this is NOT what crafters wanted what-so-ever going back to pre-COTO days. Yes, we want things to break eventually to keep a demand up, but pay to play (yes, this is pay to play when you can spend money to keep in your hands that +12 axe longer then someone who does not pay) is not what we wanted at all.

    This is an utterly terrible idea. In the least, there should be a in game gold option.


    This and Oracle costs when PvP fires up (R37) will force me into running around in basic copper armor and weps that I can afford to lose. My good stuff now (all +9 and above) will have to go into the bank for rare occasions and never be used much.
     
    Last edited: Nov 14, 2016
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  9. 2112Starman

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    Ive mined myself to gm mining and GM blacksmith. tens of thousands of copper. I have 3000 ore and 500 ingots sitting in my chest now. I have not got 1 COTO from mining. I have farmed cultists up to adv lvl 84. Take however many exp points that is and divide it by like 2K and you can see how many I have killed. I got one like bronze COTO drop.

    In my opinion, it can pretty much be said that one cannot expect a COTO out in the wild.
     
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  10. LoneStranger

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    If this were one weapon that players had to repair/coto/replace, then ok, fine. But we're not talking about one uber-weapon. We're talking about a weapon, a shield, a helm, chest, gloves, legs, boots, necks, rings, belts... This could get real expensive real quick, and not everyone is farming the [redacted] off the [redacted] to make a ton of money. There are a lot of rich characters who this won't affect because it'll be a drop on the bucket for them, but the regular joe will be.

    I get that it's supposed to stimulate the economy, but if you imagine that those who have the money to go buy another uber-item will do that, it means the prices for those items will never come down to regular folk prices. We're still missing a mid-tier market.
     
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  11. yarnevk

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    They said in the video that nobody expects anyone to actually repair that many times. Instead they expect fewer repairs for more reasonable fees before giving into supporting another player's crafting economy. Of course it is a subscription fee but it only becomes one if you reach into your wallet. You can instead grind for gold and buy COTO from other players, or use the gold to buy replacement crafted items. Of course they hope you reach into your wallet, but even if you stay and grind they still win because that means the crafter and you both stayed in the game and created a game economy, and some other player might just buy a COTO because there is an economy.

    Free to Play games are never truly free to play, they just give you the option to play for free if you can stomach the grind. Somebody has to pay to keep the lights on, and the existance of COTO is because the decorations shop was not doing it.

    When you support a patreon or a twitcher are they also taxing you? Or are you putting coins in their pocket because you thought the entertainment was worth more than free?
     
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  12. Gideon Thrax

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    Another part of the conversation that's been glossed over is the status-quo of vendor pricing on gear. I think a lot of people expect current pricing to persist after this new COTO strategy is put in place. The elephant in the room isn't the COTO - like what was said in the video, no one is going to repair the same gear more than a couple times... I think a lot of the push back in this thread comes from people knowing players are going to want moderately priced gear and that's going to mean a lot of crafters will have to lower their prices to stay competitive. High-end gear will still have a market - it just won't be the only market.
     
  13. 2112Starman

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    Virtually impossible. At this point, I have probably lowered the price of the enchanted chain I sell to 1/5th of what is costs me to make in time and gold (as well as still breaking the vast majority of them trying) and they still dont sell.

    Besides the fact that most people who want to have this kind of gear just make it for themselves.
     
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  14. Arlin

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    Part of that is population, but the other part of it is that once you get gear you like, there's currently no reason to replace it - ever. And most people aren't going to want to grind to the level of being able to consistently make high-level gear.
     
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  15. Syznow

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    If they implement this I hope the COTO drop rate increases dramatically. Otherwise this is too close to Pay-to-Win for comfort. People who can afford to just keep purchasing COTOs form the addon store can repair almost forever.

    I would rather they just set a hard limit on the maximum number of times a COTOs repair will work on an object. Something like, you can only repair an item using COTOs a maximum of 5 times for example. This would not create an imbalance between looted COTOs and purchased COTOs for what is a basic gameplay mechanic of item repair. The current scale is completely unreasonable for anyone who is not purchasing COTOs from the addon store and who is not someone with millions of gold who can purchase large amounts COTOS easily ingame.
     
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  16. Lua

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    I agree, COTO drops still belong in the "Omg! What is this shiny thing?!?!" category of the loot tables. But, perhaps one day the following were to occur: Gold COTOs stop repairing equipment all together. Then, a new metal type of COTO is discovered! A type whose only use is to repair items of equipment. A type which the Obisdian merchants do not have ready access to, and will not trade to you for gold COTOs. A type which can only be won while toiling in-game. This could encourage avatars to actively adventure and gather in high level/risk zones.

    My won COTOs were dropped while mining on the bottom floor of silver mines. I would estimate that I have mined considerably more than 3000 + (500*4) = 5000 ores since persistence, as I made my way to GM in all mining except for Survey (for which I don't see the point). Selling silver ore was my avatar's main income source for a long while, until I bought all the prosperity tools in-game and won a deed in the raffle. The XP I gained in my pool allowed me to level other crafting skills to GM as well. Now I am on to other fun, and way less grindy things.

    [Off Topic]
    Speaking of which, hopefully Portalarium will introduce some new varied ways to stock-pool crafting XP, other than mining. We did have recipe discovery and its bonus crafting-XP, but now I am hearing that this is soon to go away. We crafters need some new scale-able ways to pool XP, the rate of which increases as our overall crafting level increases. Adventurers have had it a whole lot easier so far, with being able to amass 100's of K's of XP or more each hour. Crafters can only dream and salivate at achieving this rate of growth. I have yet to discover any group/party activities which generate/grant crafting XP.
     
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  17. Chatele

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    As a full blown out Archer, I can agree with you here on the bows wearing out way too fast, I have lost track of how many times I have had to repair and replace my bows, so much so, I decided to make my own... And when I am too lazy to craft my bow, I look on other vendors, and I don't bother buying any Bows with less then 100 durability, because they just wear out too fast. Too costly to maintain and too expensive to constantly have to buy from others with less then 100 or more durability.
     
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  18. rild

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    Crafters will only have to lower their prices if other crafters are beating their prices, or if high-lvl gear becomes undesirable or unnecessary. Without "epic" drops like a game like WoW, there is less reason to have the best gear to get the new thing, and therefore competition becomes primarily PVP. If we have an excellent PVP economy/community (and I hope we will), this will be ok. Likewise, maybe Port should make some "deco" items exceptionally difficult/expensive to craft/maintain - thereby forcing the "townies" to participate lol.

    What we want to avoid is:
    - Eq/level grind just to be able to survive
    - Too much separation in the economies
    - Over-saturation of markets and/or devaluation of high-level eq
    - Invalidation of eq - ie, maintain its value for survival
    Fairly simple to see how these goals might conflict a bit... We're walking the Rainbow Bridge, but it's worth it my friends!

    One basic question I have is: Why MUST max durability constantly decrease on repair? Why not offer a gameplay solution: So, if max durability decrease by 10 on repair, let GM (100) level repair skill decrease by 5. 110 = 4. 120 = 3. 130 = 2. 140 = 1. 150 = 1. >150 = +++
    Just an obtuse example, but this improves/encourages specialization and could benefit the service economy. I fully support monetization of convenience for Shroud of the Avatar in appropriate areas, and I am not saying COTO repair or similar should be removed entirely. I just think a GM in repair should be able to preserve the life of an item. Hell, maybe item preservation or "restoration" could be a skill.

    Expand and deepen the skill trees as much as possible!​
     
  19. rild

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    Addendum:

    Despite all my musings on alternatives to the current system, I think I left out one crucial point. COTOs can be purchased for gold. Usually around 12-1500 gp per COTO. This is a rather paltry sum to repair your favorite piece of eq, especially compared to the cost to CREATE much of that eq.
     
  20. LoneStranger

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    I'd really like to know where you can find COTOs for 1200-1500 right now. :) Everyone seems to want to sell them about 2000-3000k.
     
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